Monday, January 12, 2009

Megan's got a triple dose of dumb up today, but let's start with the good news. I'd like everyone to know that it is now 100% guar-un-TEED that we will avoid a depression. I know this, obviously, because Megan is convinced that we're in one already.

My reasoning for thinking of this as a depression, rather than a recession: roughly, that we don't understand how to get in or out of it. (...) This kind of perfect financial storm is a rarer bird, and no one has plausibly claimed to have mapped the way out yet.

Megan is possibly the only person on earth who claims that we don't know what's going on. I've read at least a dozen articles about the causes of this recession, and most of them are in agreement (except for the crazy bastards blaming the black people). Megan can't be bothered to acknowledge them, however, because that would expose her readers to the idea that overly free markets played a role in this calamity andwecan'thavethatnowcanwe?

Nope, instead it's just some "perfect storm" of three things coming together in an unprecedented fashion. Megan doesn't know what those three things are, but somehow she knows that they're there. I guess that's just the Catholicism in her, that faith in three undefined but all controlling entities. Who cares, though? As I mentioned, Megan thinks we're in a depression which means next quarter will show a rapid turnaround. You're welcome.

Also on the docket today,-because she wants us to.... uh... something? I don't know, maybe just show us that she reads The New Yorker-she links to this piece, an intelligent insight into the minds of a neurotic idiot that I couldn't be bothered to finish. The author trenchantly describes the fact that she's delusional and has spent herself needlessly into huge debt whilst being not very gainfully employed in order to furnish herself a certain lifestyle. A lifestyle that she appears to have never actually evaluated before sitting down to pen this 1000 word ode to her poor life skills. It's a real thinker piece, or I'm sure it gets to be one by the end that I got far too bored to reach.

Megan's most recent post once again makes us all thankful that she never procreated. Actually, maybe I wish she had as it'd have been hard for her to become a shitty hack blogger ruining a perfectly good magazine while serving time for child neglect. On errands:

If you are a towing a child (and his gargantuan supply of diapers), it is much easier to bind him tightly into a car seat than manhandle him onto the bus.

Megan's idea of motherhood; dragging children by their ears while carrying around 50 diapers and strapping them to car seats with knots that make their arms turn blue. What human thinks babies shit "a gargantuan" number of times per day?

And indeed, whenever I write anything at all in praise of city living, I am contemptuously informed that I only like it because I don't have kids.

Hmm, and yet somehow you know all about how hard it is to raise them...?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!? And for fuck's sake, Megan actually swallows that bullshit parents say about it being "easier" to raise kids in the suburbs? Um, no, parents do that so their children don't have to sit next to any black kids in school, not because they like forcing their child to be utterly dependent on them until driving age rather than until they're old enough to read a map. She even acknowledges that in her next paragraph:

But this is not, really, a very good argument against city living. Most people spend the majority of their lives these days neither being nor having small children. And small children are the ones that make suburban living preferable. Older children are much easier to deal with in a city, because after age eleven or so, they no longer need to soak up hours of Mom's time being ferried around.

She shoots down her own arguments now... is that progress?

That's not to say that we should force the suburbanites into the city, either. To each his own. But the mere fact that something is not convenient for toddlers, or their guardians, does not ipso facto mean we should discard it in favor of something that better pleases the Playskool set.

Right, civil engineering is so nanny state. I mean, Megan's all for pricing negative externalities into things so long as that means no one has to actually make any of the sacrifices (like moving out of the suburbs) that would be required to actually mitigate those externatlities. And what the fuck is that last sentence supposed to mean? Now she's arguing against the suburbs? Wasn't her introduction in defense of them? What the fuck is this woman blathering about? I swear, she takes a straight jacketed stroll through la-la land and calls it a coherent analysis. She doesn't even know what a fucking thesis is!

I really don't understand the people that think she's any kind of intelligent. I think she basically got her audience by giving a bunch of libertarian dorks a boner over the idea of a "Jane Galt" and has just been coasting on that ever since. In the comments section of the depression post there's oodles of people saying that if the government just sat back, everything would be fine. The post I mocked below about her car has all these morons making tangential declarations about declaring "if Megan the government fucked up registering her car so badly, imagine what socialized medicine would be like!"

10 comments:

clever pseudonym
said...

That "gargantuan" description kind of threw me as well. Correct me if I'm wrong, those of you who've dealt with raising young children, because I haven't (see how that works, Megan? When you don't know what the hell you're talking about, you either admit it up front or don't remark on it at all), but wouldn't a mother running errands only need a couple of diapers? Maybe four or five at the most? You don't have to plan for the apocalypse just to go to the grocery store and back.

It's like it was just yesterday, but this is Megan from a year ago picking a fight with Krugman:

"January 11, 2008"

"Will the economy decline in 2008?Paul Krugman is voting for doom. It's worth keeping in mind, however, that Paul Krugman has predicted eight of the last none recessions under the Bush administration.

"I think it's obvious we're in a slowdown, and a recession seems likely-ish, but Britain's skirted recession for over a decade now, so I can't be too fatalistic."

Since then, Krugman's won the Nobel Prize and established himself as the most prominent economist who correctly predicted the housing bust. Megan, meanwhile, bought a car which sat in a garage for six months because she couldn't figure out how to get plates for it. Is there any one writing for a prominent masthead such as the Atlantic who is dumber than Megan?

With an actual newborn (as in, less than 6 months), they do indeed crap like every 2 hours or so. That stops once they start eating real food, pretty much by age 1. You also need some way of keeping milk or formula with you, and cold, the first year. But urination requires a new diaper just as much as crapping does. Assume 1 diaper for every 4 hours the trip takes, then add two for a margin or error.

Everything my daughter ever needed, at any age (she's almost 3 now) fit comfortably within a backpack.

I "like" how Megan believes that following her ideology, no matter the political or social circumstances, would lead to a healthy economy, yet now that there's a recession the American economy is suddenly this mysterious force that's out of everybody's hands.

She just can't imagine anything outside her own existance. The whole article is stupid. Living in suburbs "for the schools" is whitey code for "whites only." There are very good public schools in the inner city here as well as poor ones.

I know a lot of people disagree, but I don't think young teens or any preteens should be wandering the city alone. We are far too familiar with crimes against children to permit that. And as some commenters mentioned, lots of cities aren't very dense and you still have to drive, as we do. So the variables are too many to make blanket statements.

Not that that stops Megan, of course. I suppose Megan could be a good mother, but her lack of empathy and fake persona don't bode well. Happily she can't imagine having children, and that's the first step to wanting them.

I have two: The first born when I lived in NYC; the second born after I moved across the River Hudson. Sadly, it IS easier. Or, more precisely, easier to find, afford, and keep a home for four persons.

Sure, it's cheaper to live in the suburbs than the city--if you refuse to lower your standard of living. If you can live with a smaller, older house with a small back yard in an unfashionable neighborhood, you can go to the same shops, parks, restraunts, libraries, museums, and magnet schools as the families of the wealthy. It depends on what one prefers.

About us

McMegan is awful, just awful, but at least she's no longer employed by The Atlantic. Still, no one can read her every day and live, so we've all but given up trying. Let's just be glad her upwards failure has leveled off.Posts here will likely remain few and far between, as will my tweets. M. is still at his place and twitter and now also Whiskey Fire, and Clem maintains well deserved alumnus privileges.